The possibility of his having been the victim of hallucination at such an early date also raises the question whether his later abnormal states can be explained by heredity or his upbringing. By their “harsh treatment,” so Luther says on one occasion, his parents had “driven him into the monastery”; here we have an entirely new version of the motives of his choice of the religious life; he adds that, though they meant well by him, yet he had known nothing but faintheartedness and despondency.[745] Poverty still further darkened his early youth. It is quite possible that the young monk may have suffered for some considerable time from feelings of timidity and depression as a result of his education and mode of life. The natural timidity which was apparent during a part of his youth may also have contributed its quota to the rise of the legend of the monk who was ever sad. But all this does not explain as well as an hereditary malady would the terrors or seeming hallucinations. Unfortunately the question of heredity is still quite obscure, though the highly irritable temper of his father referred to above (p. 182) may have some bearing on it. Luther, however, says very little about his parents and even less of his manner of bidding good-bye to the world. The statements he makes, whether in jest or in earnest, concerning his vow to enter a religious Order, differ widely. He declares he made the vow to God in honour of St. Anne, but that God had “taken it in the Hebrew meaning,” Anne signifying grace, and had understood that Luther wished to become a monk “under grace and not under the Law,” in fact not a monk at all.[746] Very likely it is no jest, however, when he adds that, “he had soon regretted his vow, the more so since many sought to dissuade him from entering the convent”; he had, nevertheless, persisted, in spite of the objections of his father and, after that, he had had no further thought of quitting the convent, “until God deemed the time had come” (to thrust him out of it).[747] On another occasion he assures us he had entered the convent only “because he despaired of himself.”[748] And again: “God let me become a monk,” “though I entered forcibly and contrary to my father’s wishes”;[749] for I had “to learn to know the Pope’s trickery.”[750] As a rule, however, he leaves God out of the matter. He had taken the vow only “under compulsion,” so he says in self-defence; he had not become a monk “gladly and willingly”; he did not then know that a father had to be obeyed, or that vows rested only on “the commandments of men, on hypocrisy and superstition,”[751] but, during his life in the cloister, the suspicion of his father, who had now been reconciled with him, about the possibility of its having all been a diabolical delusion had sunk deeply into his mind; in his father’s words he had perforce to recognise the Voice of God.[752]